Feature: Alan Whicker's career highlights

As Alan Whicker, aged 83, returns to television with a new BBC Two documentary
series, Journey of a Lifetime, 10 years after retiring, Gerard O'Donovan
revisits the veteran broadcaster's 50 years of travelling triumphs

Broadcaster Alan Whicker, now 83, returns with a new television series, Journey of a Lifetime, 10 years after retiring. Photo: BBC

By Gerard O'Donovan

6:26PM GMT 18 Mar 2009

Alan Whicker’s style and panache inspired a generation of television presenters, from Michael Parkinson to Piers Morgan, and redefined globe-trotting broadcast journalism. Next week, a new series offers a retrospective of Whicker’s career, including his celebrity-soaked heyday in the Sixties and Seventies. But it all began with a gondola…

1. Venice: The Tonight Years

After an early career spent in the army and as a print journalist, Whicker made his first foreign report in 1958 for the BBC’s hugely popular Tonight programme from Venice, at the age of 32. To see him bobbing in a gondola on the Grand Canal is to be amazed at how fully formed a TV personality he was from that first broadcast: the now-familiar heavy-rimmed spectacles, the trim moustache, the knowing smile that says he’s entirely at home in front of a camera – and his hallmark nasal vocal delivery, much pilloried but at the time a respite from the cut-glass enunciation of most BBC presenters. The glamorous subject matter proved typical and his love affair with Venice was lifelong; he revisited the city many times, never better than in 2004’s Whicker’s War.

2. JP Getty and Whicker’s World

In 1963, straining against Tonight’s short-format reports, Whicker was allowed to make some hour-long one-offs. He achieved a coup with the first ever television interview with oil magnate John Paul Getty, then the world’s richest man. The Solitary Billionaire was a sensation, revealing Getty as a lonely recluse rattling around his vast Surrey mansion, so tight he installed a payphone for guests, unable to grieve for a “best friend” who’d died the morning of filming. Whicker followed that with another first, profiling model-turned-baroness Fiona Thyssen scooting around in her speedboat and trying on her jaw-dropping jewellery. The British public had never before been so up and close and personal with such wealth. On the back of the success of his one-offs, when BBC Two launched months after the Thyssen piece, Whicker was promptly offered his own series: it was to to be known as Whicker’s World.

Related Articles

Throughout the 1960s the weekly Whicker’s World was a byword for witty, thought-provoking television, as close as most folk ever got to the Swinging Sixties. Reports from all corners of the globe vied with issue-led pieces on everything from fox-hunting to breast enlargement to censorship. And time and again, with a hit rate way ahead of any other broadcasters’, Whicker’s programmes had a tangible effect on the viewing public. In 1967 a piece on bullfighting in Spain, for instance, sparked nationwide outrage in the UK; while a 1968 film on the cruelty of the divorce laws prompted reforms.

4. US and them

The 1970s saw Whicker spread his wings further, focusing almost exclusively on the travelogues for which he’s best known today, with a particular interest in America. In 1973 Whicker’s Way Out West (which was shown on ITV now Whicker had broken with the BBC after helping found Yorkshire Television in 1968) broke new ground by showing the first gay kiss on British television – preceding Brookside’s clinch by 21 years. Sex became a regular theme in the series, as did America’s obsession with guns and law enforcement. Throughout these programmes Whicker presciently placed great emphasis on America’s future global cultural dominance.

5. Peter Sellers & the 1980s

During a 1980 interview with Alan Whicker the comedian Peter Sellers, then at the peak of his film career and unhappily living in Hollywood, said that he wanted to die in England. Three weeks later Sellers collapsed from a heart attack while visiting London. The interview generated a media storm about how the star had “predicted” his own death, proving Whicker was quite as capable of hitting the headlines in his fifties as he had been in his youth. But he was beginning to seem old-fashioned to some, especially after an interview with Hollywood’s first female studio boss Sherry Lansing betrayed some decidedly pre-war attitudes.

6. The Sultan of Brunei and other absolute rulers

1992 saw the last great Whicker interview, when he gained unprecedented access to the Sultan of Brunei as he celebrated his silver jubilee in a gold-panelled palace. The Sultan is seen as a living god by a people who prostrate themselves in his presence. Here was wealth and power breathtaking for its obscenity rather than glamour. It called to mind earlier Whicker triumphs in the realm of serious politics such as when, in 1969, he showed the Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier blithely throwing dollar bills out of the window as he drove through crowds of starving people.